The Five Senses, or How Alfred F Jones Dies
by Everion Radnor
Summary: When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follows taste, smell, and touch.


When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follows taste, smell, and touch.

* * *

His glasses are getting foggy. He takes them off to rub at the lenses and blinks at the bright sun. It blinds him.

But then, he has been blind to a lot of things for a long, long time. He's not sure when the cloudiness began, what crept across the surface of his conjunctiva to ensure that the stars, both embroidered and globular gas spheres quietly slid away, leaving only red and white to strangle and strip him to the bone.

He doesn't find peace in the black anymore. It swallows him and this is what scares him most-he will lose the ability to perceive the darkness and it will swallow him in its entirety.

England used to chase the dark away, but now, well…he's not a child and the dark contains only the monsters he has made.

* * *

Has he ever told anyone that he couldn't taste anymore?

It was one of those things that happen suddenly, catching him up in the revelation of it. He would now never, ever be able to sink in the sensation of oregano pinging his brain, sizzling on his tongue, never know again the unique kick of a person's skin, all an interplay of flavor and sweetness and salt, never, ever savor the tang of orgasm, not that he usually ever did, anyway.

He cannot speak, cannot taste the words on his lips.

Oh, well. At least he won't be able to choke on the bile that rises when he hears the others.

* * *

Smell leaves slowly, like dying embers. He realizes his hyposmia when his ever loyal secretary and bodyguard in one, Anna Deplassey, brushes past him in a hurry and he can't detect the hint of Charlie that's always on her, along with Avon's Little Black Dress deodorant.

He can't smell exhaust fumes and fast food and all those little things that never mattered and now suddenly do simply because he has noticed they matter.  
His mind digs up a sense-memory~Jitterbug with France and croissants fresh from the oven. The Nazis had left.

He has never felt more alive and simultaneously more bereft of life when he loses his ability to smell.

He kisses the lips of his trusting soul, and as they put their hands on them, he sinks to his knees in a show of reverence and buries himself in them, seeking every ounce of heat before their cells and tissues decay and annihilate themselves.

He traces their sternocleidomastoids, all the way to behind the ear and presses down gently.

* * *

Touch disappears quickly after that, when he's pulling his socks on and realizes that the soft weave had no pleasure for him. He keeps few possessions nowadays. His fingers and feet are numb.

When he burns his hand making soup, the only reason he pulls it away is because he hears the hiss of seared flesh. It takes longer than usual to heal, flesh slowly, slowly knitting back together, like it has all the time in the world to rejoin.

Ivan whispers in his ear, strokes his pectorals and slides down, thumbs steady and reassuring on his pelvic bone. When they finish, he steadies him with a hand on his back and whispers strange words in his ear, to comfort or scare, he isn't sure.  
His hearing has improved drastically.  
He takes Anna to a showing of an opera- all he sees is a blank white, not even light and dark. Everything is indistinguishable. He can hear their chorals, but finds no pleasure in it.

Ivan watches him, but says nothing.  
He thinks that is a pity. He would have liked to hear the thrum of his voice one more time. He thinks Ivan brushes his lips with his fingers, but only because Anna tells him so, soft, hushed city inflections resonating in his pinna.

* * *

And one day, he hears nothing, not even the dull pulse of blood in his ears. His cage walls are solid, smooth, gray and unbroken. He seeks no freedom from it- it is not meant for him anymore.

As so, he uses his last escape, his wild card. None will mourn his passing. 7% of the world's total population is alive. 10 billion are dead. Of the seven billion, none mourn. He runs.

Runs far, runs wide, runs free.  
It may have left him, but he hasn't left it.

When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follows taste, smell, and touch.

Alfred F Jones, America's last bastion of patriotism, is dead.

* * *

Oh, well. He'll be born again. It's just a tiring game, that's all~ he can't remember how many times he's died and got up again.


End file.
